When historians want to understand how a state functioned at some earlier time, they look for a period of civil crisis. In Britain, outbreaks of the plague provide key benchmarks of the sophistication of administrators. Studying evidence of accountability, the nature of the forces that can be mobilised, the capacity to record detail and keep and update information, these are all indicators of the health of the underpinnings of a functioning state.

The news from Chibok in the Borno province of north-east Nigeria, where more than 200 schoolgirls are still missing more than a fortnight after they were abducted from their dormitories, tells a more difficult story. Nigeria is a huge country, the world's seventh most populous and so diverse it has been dismissed as a mere geographical expression. The religious tension between north and south means that, for many people, faith is a primary source of identification, something successive governments have done little to address. Insecurity and official corruption, said one recent report, have left most Nigerians poorer than they were at independence in 1960. Development has bypassed rural areas such as Chibok almost entirely, empowering Boko Haram, the violent jihadi organisation that Amnesty International believes has murdered at least 750 civilians so far this year. Boko Haram does not claim to have abducted the girls, but the day they were kidnapped it set off a bomb in Abuja that killed 75 people, and it has murdered scores of teachers and students in its campaign to end western influence in classrooms.

Rich from its vast oil reserves, Nigeria likes to present itself as the face of Africa rising. The week before the kidnapping, it declared its economy was larger than South Africa's. But so far, its response to the kidnapping has belonged firmly in the other African narrative: hopeless Africa. Neither the president, Goodluck Jonathan, nor his wife, Patience, have engaged with the kidnapping. The news has been erratic, conflicting and impossible to corroborate. This week, there have been reports that the girls are just a phone call from freedom, that they have been forcibly converted to Islam and distributed as wives to the terrorists, and that they have been trafficked across the border into Cameroon. The provincial military – which has been accused of gross human rights violations in Borno – at first claimed that the students had all been rescued and, when that was hotly denied by their families, claimed it had suffered heavy losses from engagements with the terrorists in the forest in attempts to release them.

• This article was amended on 5 May 2014. An earlier version said Amnesty International believed Boko Haram had murdered 1,500 people so far this year. Amnesty believes more than 1,500 have been killed in north-eastern Nigeria this year in total, at least half of them in attacks by Boko Haram.